Doug's Oracle Blog

Yes, it's that time again although I decided we should delay it a little while when I realised we could take advantage of the visit of Lucas Jellema to Singapore!

The date is set for 14th July so there's only a couple of weeks to go. Here is the agenda (SingaporeOracleSessionsIII.pdf) and a map (SOSMap.pdf) to help you get to the venue which is very handily placed near Bugis MRT. All that's required to register is to email me at dougburns at Yahoo.

Thanks to Hemant and Lucas for offering to present and to Vikki Lira of the OTN Oracle ACE team for agreeing to sponsor the event. As Hemant is an Oracle ACE and Lucas an Oracle ACE Director, the evening will have a truly ACE feel added to the usual Singapore vibe.

Can't wait!

P.S. Yes, I never did post a review of SOS II. That's how busy I've been lately

Last Monday evening we had the first Singapore Oracle Sessions - an informal meetup of Oracle professionals thrown together at the last minute by a few of us.

Morten Egan (or as I believe he is called in Denmark now - The Traitor ) mentioned to me months ago that if there was no user group when we arrived in Singapore, then we should start one. At the time he was the current (now retired) chairman of the Danish Oracle User Group (DOUG, strangely enough) and, as I've presented at and supported various Oracle user events over the years and am an ACE Director, it seemed fitting that we should try to build something for the Singapore Oracle community.

The fact that the Oracle ACE Hemant Chitale works for the same company and that the ACE Director Bjoern Rost would be spending a few days at my place before continuing on to the OTN APAC Tour was too much of an opportunity. After a short chat on Twitter we decided to bite the bullet and I started researching venues and contacted some of the locals. We only had 6 days to arrange it so it was either brave or stupid!

As it came together and (through a few very good contacts) we had more and more attendees registering it started to seem like a reality and eventually Bjoern, Madeleine and I found ourselves walking along to the Bugis area on Monday, hoping for the best. Despite some initial problems finding the venue, we arrived to find the extremely helpful Sean Low of Seminar Room who took excellent care of us.

Within the matter of 15 minutes or so, 33 of the 36 or so who had registered were safely settled in their seats (including my other half Madeleine who *never* attends Oracle stuff!) for my brief introduction during which Sean insisted I try out the hand-held microphone.

My big Sinatra moment (not).

First up was Bjoern Rost of Portrix with "Change the way you think about tuning with SQL Plan Management" which, as those who've seen me present on the subject at Openworld, BGOUG or UKOUG would know is a subject dear to my heart. However, Bjoern seems to have had much more success with it than my failed attempts that were damned by literal values and Dynamic SQL. (I've since had a little more success, but mainly as a narrow solution to very specific problems.)

As you can see, the room was pretty full and the audience very attentive (except for a few people who appear to be mucking around with their phones!). They weren't afraid to ask some interesting and challenging questions too, which I always find very encouraging.

Early in Bjoern's presentation we suffered what I would say was the only significant disappointment of the night as both the drinks and the pizza turned up early! It was nice of the delivery companies not to be late, but my stupid expectation that 7pm meant 7pm ensured that I was standing at the back of the room surrounded by obviously gorgeous pizza that was slowly going cold, not knowing whether I should stop Bjoern in his tracks or not. Manners dictated not (particularly as there were so many people in a small room) but the pizza experience later suggests I was wrong. Lesson learned! (Note that I had to ask others about the pizza as it's on my extensive list of things I don't eat.)

What obviously didn't go wrong at all was the social interaction between all of the attendees and speakers. It probably helped that there were a few attendees from some organisations and that people from different organisations had worked with each other in the past but it's a *long* time since I've felt such a vibrant energy during a break.

I was on next, presenting on "Real Time SQL Monitoring" and apart from a few hiccups with the clicker I borrowed from Bjoern and a couple of slide corrections I need to make, I think it went reasonably well and people seemed as enthused by SQL Mon reports as I've come to expect! With that done, and a quick smoke (I *love* organising an agenda ), it was time for Morten with his "Big Data Primer"

I think this might have been lots of peoples favourite presentation because it wasn't just about Oracle and Morten packed in plenty of the humour I've come to expect from him. Better still, it seemed to work for a quite cosmopolitan audience, so good work!

Afterwards he said a few words asking for people's feedback and whether there was a desire to setup a local user group or just continue with these informal sessions (sponsors permitting) and all of the feedback I heard later showed that people are very keen for a repeat run.

Overall, Monday night felt like a great success.

The passion and enthusiasm of the attendees was very encouraging and reflected in the subsequent feedback which has been consistently positive but also thoughtful so far. There's no question that a decent minority of the local Oracle community are looking for regular opportunities to hear decent speakers on subjects that interest them, meet and discuss issues with each other and also offer to present themselves, which is a great start for any Oracle User Group.

Strangely, I discovered a day or so later that there are already plans for a User Group and the Singapore launch event is next Wednesday. Coincidentally this is only 9 days after SOS! You can look into the APOUG website here and a number of colleagues and I will attend the launch event. I suppose it's a small shame that it's an APAC-wide user group, rather than specific to Singapore, which the number of attendees at such short notice would suggest Singapore can justify, but I'll be interested to see what APOUG has planned.

Big thanks for Alvin from Oracle for endless supplies of fine pizza and Bjoern Rost of Portrix Systems for the room hire (I bought the drinks, which some would say was appropriate but I couldn't possibly comment) and thanks again to all the attendees for making it a fun night!

I didn't notice until I was about to post this that Bjoern had already blogged about the evening and I think he's captured it perfectly.

When I knew that the ACE Director, Bjoern Rost of Portrix Systems was coming to Singapore on his way to begin the OTN APAC tour, I suggested he stay at mine for a few days and sample all that Singapore has to offer.

Then a thought occurred to me. While he was here, why not setup an informal Oracle users meetup, much like the various ones at cities around the world like Sydney, Birmingham and London (to name but three I'm aware of). Morten Egan, my new colleague and Oak Table luminary had already suggested to me months ago that we should get something going in Singapore, so why not start now?

Well, in a matter of a few days, we've put together an agenda, a room, we will be having pizza and beer and other drinks and three hopefully useful sessions from experienced speakers.

Here is the agenda (SingaporeOracleSessions.pdf) and a map (SOSMap.pdf) to help you get to the venue which is very handily placed near Bugis MRT. All that's required to register is to email me at dougburns at Yahoo. There are currently 21 people registered but the room holds (believe it or not) 42, so spread the word!

Disclosure: I'm attending Openworld at the invitation of the OTN ACE Director program who are paying for my flights, hotel and conference fee. My employer has helpfully let me attend on work time, as well as sending other team mates because they recognise the educational value of attending. Despite that, all of the opinions expressed in these posts are, as usual, all my own.

Having been awake for so many hours, I was along at Oak Table World bright and early because :-

1) I wanted to make damn sure I got one of the T-shirts. The courier had let down poor Kyle Hailey so they weren't there at first, but I accosted him to remind him that I was one of the first group of people there (Oh, and it worked later when they turned up.)

2) Because Mogens Norgaard was on first with a 30 minute opening talk. Mmmm, at 08:30? Who came up with *that* moment of scheduling genius?! LOL ... Sure enough, Kyle had to implement a last-minute schedule change and Riyaj Shamsudeen helped out by stepping up to deliver his 9:00 slot 30 minutes early.

Which was a shame for those who showed up at 09:00 and missed the first half of his In-memory Internals presentation, which I loved. Riyaj always works at a deep level but in those areas that are practically important, rather than just showing off his smarts!

I picked up a few extremely useful things from this presentation but I think the most important one was the journaling area used when rows in the standard row-orientated buffer cache have been updated. Which, for starters, means that only 80% of the allocated memory will be available for your original data. Not a problem, but worth knowing.

What really jumped out at me though was when he discussed how the number of updated rows could affect the optimiser's decision to use In-Memory or not. I might not have explained that very well, but I believe the effect would be that the optimiser is likely to flip between using In-Memory or not depending on quite a few variables. Which means one thing to me. Potential Execution Plan instability. I'm not sure how Oracle could get around this because cost-based decisions are the sensible approach but I foresee lots of new performance analysis and tuning opportunities! Not quite "flick a switch and it just works", but who would ever believe that kind of thing anyway?

Great presentation, though. Exactly what Oak Table World is all about so thanks to Kyle Hailey and the various sponsors () and speakers for making it happen!

When Mogens eventually showed up, he was on top form for his enormously entertaining Conference Opening where he delved into that new Big Data thingy. The strange thing about his presentations is that although they're very quotable, I always find I've been enjoying it too much to remember a damn thing he said! LOL But I managed to have many interesting talks with him later in the week about how unstoppable this Big Data thing is for those who need it. You could question who really needs it, but I personally remember the days of 'why would anyone need their own personal computer' too.

Next up was Andy Mendelsohn's Database General Session in an extremely frosty Marriot. I've become more of a fan of air-conditioning over the past 3 months but this was ridiculous! The presentation was very cloudy at first, then came the In-Memory stuff including Maria Colgan giving the cool demo which I've seen before but seems to have been polished up. The other thing that struck me for the first time in this presentation was just how much better Oracle's new slide template is! As anyone who has used it would confirm, the old one was *very* red and blocky and intense and the new one is so much cleaner and spacious and uses colours that don't kill your eyes. I thought the difference was staggering and actually found myself wanting to look at them for a change! But, on the whole, it was a relatively sober and honest presentation without any great announcements, but plenty of focus on delivering the meat of the previous year's announcements.

Then I was straight over to the first Real World Performance group presentation with Andy Holdsworth and Graham Wood talking about some of the higher level application design issues they have discovered via AWR reports. But first they kicked off with their usual dose of performance analysis and design reality, reflecting on the daft way that customers approach performance (and those last word are mine, based on my own experiences).

They talked about the obsession people seem to have with identifying and treating narrow symptoms of problems that are, in reality, application design problems that need to be treated from the top down in order to relieve the low-level symptoms.

For example, right at the top of the report is the number of sessions. Imagine 3,300 sessions on a 32 core server. Well you don't need to because this was an AWR report from a real system so no imagination is necessary. Does that make any sense to anyone? Then why do we still see that kind of thing all the time?

... or how about finding open_cursors set to 2000? A per-session limit of 2000 cursors? As Graham pointed out - good luck keeping track of the state of all of those! As soon as you stop and think about these things sensibly, you realise that it's almost certainly a sign of an application leaking cursors.

There were lots of similar examples but the interesting overall approach that I would say they were illustrating is something that I tend to do when I first arrive at a new client site and I've watched other experienced Oracle techies do the same.An AWR report is not just the top 5 timed events and the sections at the top are a pretty good description of the actual system workload which, in turn, can tell you a lot about the application design. Then, based on potential application design issues, you can drill down into the report and look at later sections to see where all those leaked cursors or transaction rollbacks or (whatever) ... are coming from.

Updated Later: As Toon Koppelaars highlighted on Twitter later, you can see this version of exactly what I'm talking about here, for free. I should hang my head in shame because Andrew and Graham made a point of all the RWP videos being available online here. Watch and enjoy!

Lucky boy that I am, I was able to retire to the comforting surroundings of the Thirsty Bear to continue the conversation about all things performance related with Graham and JB, much of the conversation being me whining about why people don't use the *full* range of tools that come with the Diagnostics and Tuning Packs that they've paid Oracle good money for. That's why I've been slowly developing a presentation on that very subject.

Then it was back to Oak Table World to catch Greg Rahn talking about all that Hadoop stuff *again*! Even though I only caught part of the presentation, I do keep managing to pick up bits and pieces on the subject although I wonder when it'll become relevant to my day to day work. Probably whenever I'm too late to the party, as usual

But my main reason for showing up was to see Kevin Closson talking about using SLOB in some less obvious ways. Because SLOB is a good all-round Oracle workload generator, it shouldn't be seen as simply a tool for testing storage performance and that's probably it's main strength. Kevin is always a great speaker and I find listening to him a very different experience to reading his blog, but I'm not sure I can put my finger on why. Oh, he also had the most ridiculously bright SLOB buttons! (As I found out by making the mistake of looking to closely at it as I tried to switch it on )

At some point, all of the slides for the Oak Table World presentations should be available on the site, so keep a look out for those! (Oh, and I got my T-shirt which is deeply cool and was one of the few items of non-ACE swag I managed to pick up all week)

From there on, it was more or less party all the way.

- First quiet beers and snacks with lots of Oak Table and Oracle types.

- Then my very first ever Customer event that wasn't for a specific technology area, but a sales region. Man, *that* was a mistake! Suits *everywhere*! but I suppose it was useful to build contacts with the senior support managers in my new region.

- Instead, I headed towards the OTN night in Howard Street (until I realised I'd just dropped my bag with the entry ticket back at my hotel room)

- So instead I landed at one of the events of this and any other OOW - The Friends of Pythian Party'. As always, beautifully-organised, very generous on the liquid refreshments and the coolest crowd in town. Just because I find myself thanking Vanessa Simmons, Paul Vallee and all of the Pythian crew every year doesn't make it any less sincere.I have to be honest, though, and say that the highlight of the night for me was spending much more time with Kevin's punchy, beautiful and fun wife Lori. If you think Kevin's smart, wait until you meet his wife! There's a lady who can hold her own and make me chuckle Problem is that I think she's used to scaring people but us Scots don't scare so easily

It was a great night anyway, as always, and although this is entirely unconnected to the Pythian party but might have had a *lot* to do with jet lag, I didn't wake up until 11:45 the next morning

Disclosure: I'm attending Openworld at the invitation of the OTN ACE Director program who are paying for my flights, hotel and conference fee. My employer has helpfully let me attend on work time, as well as sending other team mates because they recognise the educational value of attending. Despite that, all of the opinions expressed in these posts are, as usual, all my own.

After the very welcome tradition of breakfast at Lori's Diner, I had time to register and then get myself down to Moscone South for my first session of the day. I'd planned to listen to Paul Vallee's security talk because I'd been unable to register for Gwen Shapira'sAnalyzing Twitter data with Hadoop session but noticed spare seats as I passed the room, so switched. I love listening to Gwen talk on any subject because her enthusiasm is contagious. A few of the demos went a little wrong but I still got a nice overview of the various components of a Hadoop solution (which is an area I've never really looked at much) so the session flew by. Good stuff.

Next up was Yet-another-Oracle-ACE-Director Arup Nanda's presentation on Demystifying Cache Buffer Chains. The main reason I attended was to see how he presented the subject and wasn't expecting to learn too much but it's an important subject, particularly now I'm working with RAC more often and consolidated environments. CBC latch waits are on my radar once more!

Next up was 12 things about 12c, a session of 12 speakers given 5 minutes to talk about, well, 12c stuff. Debra Lilley organised this and despite all her concerns that she'd expressed leading up to it, it went very smoothly, so hats off to Debra and to the speakers for behaving themselves with the timing! I was particularly concerned that we kicked off with Jonathan Lewis Big problem with putting him on first - will he actually be able to stay within the time constraints? Because he'll get too excited and want to talk about things in more depth. He did do it, but it was tough as he raced towards the finishing line

The only thing that bugged me about this was that I hadn't realised it was two session slots (makes complete sense if I'd performed some simple maths!) but it was very annoying when they kicked everyone out of the room at half-time before readmitting them. Yes, there are rules, but this was one of the more stupid. It annoyed me enough that I decided to skip the second half and attend the Enkitec panel session instead.

What an amazing line-up of Exadata geek talent they had on one stage for Expert Oracle Exadata: Then and Now ....

Including most of the authors of the original book as well as the authors who are writing the next edition which should be out before the end of the year.

They talked a little about the original version of the book (largely based on V2) and how far Exadata had come since then, but it was a pretty open session with questions shooting around all over the place and great fun. Nice way for me to wrap up my user group conference activities for the day and head out into the sun for Larry's Opening Keynote.

First we had the traditional vendor blah-blah-blah about stuff I couldn't care less about but, in shocking news, I actually enjoyed it! Maybe it's because it was Intel and so I'm probably more interested in what they're doing, but it was pretty ok stuff. All the keynotes are available online here.

Then it was LarryTime. Seemed on pretty good form by recent standards although I can summarise it simply as Cloud, Cloud and more Cloud. There's no getting away from the fact that it's been quite the about-turn from him in his attitude towards the Cloud. I did appreciate the "we're only just getting started" message and I suppose I've become innured to how accurate the actual facts are in his presentations and to the attacks on competitors so I sort of enjoy his keynotes more than most.

At this stage, the jetlag was biting *hard* and I ended up missing yet another ACE dinner but from all the reports I heard it was the best ever by some distance so I was gutted to miss out on it. But when you're body is saying sleep whilst you're walking, sometimes you have to listen to it! Then again, when it decides to wake you up again at 2:30, perhaps you should tell it to go and take a running jump!

Disclaimer

For the avoidance of any doubt, all views expressed here are my own and not those of past or current employers, clients, friends, Oracle Corporation, my Mum or, indeed, Flatcat. If you want to sue someone, I suggest you pick on Tigger, but I hope you have a good lawyer. Frankly, I doubt any of the former agree with my views or would want to be associated with them in any way.